1. I did that (once only - I'm not totally evil) several years ago on a wet road. That is tapped the brakes to light them up. The rapidly approaching small truck braked hard and the road camber (curved road surface) moved him into the ditch. What a nice surprise.
2. Then my geology teacher came to class one day and said he tapped his brakes which sent some stupid #$% into the ditch. He was so grimly pleased I realized right there I never wanted to date his beautiful daughter (even if I could have).
Might not be the case in the US, but in the UK the official Highway Code suggests braking as a resolution to tailgaters, so I guess the only 'evil' part of it is finding glee in someone else flying off the road. Must admit, though, it's pretty common to find glee in other people's self imposed misery:) (see Darwin Prize!)
One trick is to quickly brake ever so slightly and throw your rear fog lights on at the same time making it look like you've slammed your brakes on hard. That tends to sort the men from the boys.
Yes, there is a delay between actually seeing the desktop and the Start menu working, which is a couple of seconds. I should admit I'm talking about a heavily tweaked XPLite adaptation of XP, rather than the usual one which does take somewhat longer. Of course, even once XP is 'booted', it's still churning for a while loading who knows what, but I consider it 'booted' as soon as I can hit the Start Menu and the system works, whether it's still loading programs or not.
I totally agree, but isn't the state of affairs with e-mail really totally sad? I mean.. it's a digital form of communications that, by all rights, should be secure, guaranteed, and so forth. Instead, we have to use analog communications with either postal guarantees or real-time confirmation.
Are there any e-mail style systems that do claim to be 100% fail-proof?
I think the problem is that storage is never a good solution to gas problems. The storage capacities are absolutely tiny. I would love someone to actually give the correct figures, as I may be wrong, but I recall reading that our stores are divided into 'short term' and 'long term' stores with the short term able to last merely a day at full supply, and long term somewhere in the range of a few days/week.
If what I recall is roughly true, then a dip of, say, 10%-20% in gas supply (or an increase in demand) would lead to brownouts in supply within a week or two.
Smart point, but wasn't the AllOfMp3 complaint officially made by the USA? Since the USA has almost no reliance on anything Russian at all (except the occasional spaceship), I'm not sure it's comparable (although the British music rights people are pretty pissed about AllOfMp3 as well).
A cold chill just fell on relations between Russia and the West.
An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps. We have been on the verge of a gas crisis here in the UK for some time now.
Diplomacy cuts both ways, and I dare say the UK government isn't going to push this too far given the energy situation.
UTF-8 is the de facto standard encoding of Unicode characters, but in the interests of not having someone respond with "but Unicode != UTF-8" I thought I'd add the proviso (although it opened me to complaints of the opposite nature, of course;-))
8 bit characters is exactly what it/does/ support. It's multi-byte characters that are often seen as the problem, although UTF-8 is also supported (Unicode generally, however, is a different matter). Ruby can also support load balancing and HTTPS.. although since those aren't relevant to a programming language per se, it's intriguing why you bring them up (unless I've fallen for a troll, in which case.. well done;-))
Other than the occasional mindblowing FPS (and even multiplayer ones are 'unlimited' in the time you can play them), I only play 'unlimited hours' games. Simulations, sports games, god games.. they're all limitless. You can play NHL hockey as many times as you want, you can keep building cities in Simcity 4 for as long as you want, you can play Battlefield 2 for as long as you want.. that's real value for money. MMORPGs, same deal.
Don't quote me on this, but I don't think JRuby actually compiles right down to Java byte code. JRuby is an interpreter that runs on the JVM itself, rather than a compiler that converts Ruby into Java byte code (or even uses JIT).
Video game commercials are still bad, in the most part. It's only this year I've noticed video game commercials start to use actual in-game footage, rather than pre-rendered crap.
Using pre-renders is also a big problem on the net. When I hear about Gran Turismo 5 (or whatever), why do they always show us great pre-rendered shots that are totally unrepresentative of what you'll see in the game? I don't want to see a preview video of the cars from the outside.. I want to see the actual gameplay footage. Yet, people drool over the pre-renders, and then when the real game hits.. it's never as good.
I guess this is a problem with all advertising, however.. but it seems particularly dishonest with videogames to me.
In this Digg generation, I've still kept reading Slashdot. The community here feels a lot nicer (surprising, I know!) and a lot more clued up. It's just a shame, then, that idiotic stories like this get posted. Usually I wouldn't whine about a bad story, but it was an hour or two before this story hit that I read the whole "why it's a scam" story on Digg.. so I read how stupid something is on Digg, only for it to be posted seriously here at Slashdot.
It's time for some sort of shakeup with editorial at Slashdot. Digg is imperfect and a lot of the users are idiots (I'd certainly say the average Slashdotter is significantly more intelligent and clued-up) but Slashdot is slow and has a poor editorial process. Could we, perhaps, strive to produce something with the perfect mix of the two? Fast news, the ability to vote, etc, but coupled with the superb Slashdot audience? It's all false hope, I'm sure, but I have more hope in people than technology.. so Slashdot is just the place to bring this up IMHO.
An cheap house costs 5x income. You get about 5 square feet to play with. We don't have mobile housing over here, the only real option is renting.
That's not true. I just saw an ad in the paper today for a mobile home in a residential park for £66k just several miles from here. Not the sort of place I'd want to live, granted, but there's always the option. They're not as common over here, but there's still a lot.
They say "pedestrians could also be asked to give prints if they are suspected to have committed an offence".
Considering that anyone can be suspected of anything, this opens the gates for totally random fingerprinting in the street. We already have random checks and detentions for the flimsiest of reasons. Consider the 34 year old woman labeled a terrorist for walking along a cycle path, the stopping and searching of an 11 year old girl near an RAF base, "the detention of a 21 year old student for taking pictures of the M3 motorway for a web-design company", the ejection of an 82 year old man at the 2005 Labour Party conference, and the detention of an 80-year-old man carrying an anti-Blair placard, for example. If you refuse, the precedents set by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Terrorism Act 2000, and Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 would ensure it unlikely you'd get off scott-free but instead become more of a suspect.
Still, I'm not going to do anything about it other than complain about it online, as is my wont. In another 50 years when I'm eating my Soylent Green in my 29th-floor bugged apartment, I can pull out ruffled print-outs of Web pages like these, and think back to a time when at least my bowel movements weren't RFID tagged and scanned for prohibited substances.
Basically, the British government is corrupt to the core and bordering on fascist. But.. what government isn't these days?
If these places are anything like my town, you can just call the cops, say there's a large group of people loitering, and get them all moved on and lose their position in line. A few times of doing that, they're not staying;-)
My point is, whether you know Computer Science or not, if you don't have proof (read college education) that this stuff was at least presented to you properly, odds are that you'll have a tough time finding someone willing to pay you... Big companies have so much overhead when it comes to hiring people, that they'll usually just throw out any resume that doesn't say "degree"
Often true, but not always. If you know your stuff and you prove it in other ways, the offers can come flooding in. Smart companies often employ people based on their open source contributions, for example, and pay as well as, if not better, than generic companies sifting through resumes. From the small set of people I know, the smartest are always hired because they're known in their community and the quality of their work is obvious, not because they sent off a resume. Basically, smart people don't need resumes, they have their reputation.
Seconded - it's a good, solid book, but..
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The reviewer is right, it's a good book. It has a few inaccuracies (confusing a TIME server with an NTP server, for example) but generally it contains hundreds of code snippets that allow anyone experienced with OOP or other dynamic languages to pick up Ruby pretty easily. As he says, it's not a 'learn Ruby' book but it could be ideal for those who want to learn without being 'told' what to do.. it's just got hundreds of code examples that are written in the clean, most acceptable Ruby style, and if you can learn from code examples, it's the best book to buy right now.
Be warned, however, it doesn't go into much detail about things like libraries or Ruby on Rails, so it's not a bible to the whole Ruby ecosystem, but for the Ruby language by itself, it's great.
> Now the National Identity Register and National DNA Database - they scare me. I'll fight against > those!
Why? Something to hide? Remind me of the downside again?
Let's say you repair a walkie-talkie radio for someone. That walkie-talkie then gets sold on eBay and eventually ends up in the hands of a suicide bomber. Your DNA is then found at a crime scene. Enjoy the interrogation. (Yes, this has happened.)
It depends what you're using the image tagging for. If it's just for search, a la Google, then it doesn't matter if you get some false positives (though it had better be way under 50%!). I mean, if you search for something on Google you sometimes come up with totally irrelevant stuff to the query, and people aren't that worried about it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I did that (once only - I'm not totally evil) several years ago on a wet road. That is tapped the brakes to light them up. The rapidly approaching small truck braked hard and the road camber (curved road surface) moved him into the ditch. What a nice surprise.
:) (see Darwin Prize!)
2. Then my geology teacher came to class one day and said he tapped his brakes which sent some stupid #$% into the ditch. He was so grimly pleased I realized right there I never wanted to date his beautiful daughter (even if I could have).
Might not be the case in the US, but in the UK the official Highway Code suggests braking as a resolution to tailgaters, so I guess the only 'evil' part of it is finding glee in someone else flying off the road. Must admit, though, it's pretty common to find glee in other people's self imposed misery
One trick is to quickly brake ever so slightly and throw your rear fog lights on at the same time making it look like you've slammed your brakes on hard. That tends to sort the men from the boys.
*guffaw*
Yes, there is a delay between actually seeing the desktop and the Start menu working, which is a couple of seconds. I should admit I'm talking about a heavily tweaked XPLite adaptation of XP, rather than the usual one which does take somewhat longer. Of course, even once XP is 'booted', it's still churning for a while loading who knows what, but I consider it 'booted' as soon as I can hit the Start Menu and the system works, whether it's still loading programs or not.
For reference, Windows XP boots in 7 seconds under Parallels on my iMac. Funny thing is, it takes longer to restore from a snapshot!
I totally agree, but isn't the state of affairs with e-mail really totally sad? I mean.. it's a digital form of communications that, by all rights, should be secure, guaranteed, and so forth. Instead, we have to use analog communications with either postal guarantees or real-time confirmation.
Are there any e-mail style systems that do claim to be 100% fail-proof?
The stats are on the front page of their site:
Global Stats:
Accounts: 62357
Domains: 103552
Records: 292615
The implementation details are in the FAQ and About. Without bothering to read them again, I think they use a modified tinydns.
I think the problem is that storage is never a good solution to gas problems. The storage capacities are absolutely tiny. I would love someone to actually give the correct figures, as I may be wrong, but I recall reading that our stores are divided into 'short term' and 'long term' stores with the short term able to last merely a day at full supply, and long term somewhere in the range of a few days/week.
If what I recall is roughly true, then a dip of, say, 10%-20% in gas supply (or an increase in demand) would lead to brownouts in supply within a week or two.
Smart point, but wasn't the AllOfMp3 complaint officially made by the USA? Since the USA has almost no reliance on anything Russian at all (except the occasional spaceship), I'm not sure it's comparable (although the British music rights people are pretty pissed about AllOfMp3 as well).
A cold chill just fell on relations between Russia and the West.
An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps. We have been on the verge of a gas crisis here in the UK for some time now.
Diplomacy cuts both ways, and I dare say the UK government isn't going to push this too far given the energy situation.
UTF-8 is the de facto standard encoding of Unicode characters, but in the interests of not having someone respond with "but Unicode != UTF-8" I thought I'd add the proviso (although it opened me to complaints of the opposite nature, of course ;-))
8 bit characters is exactly what it /does/ support. It's multi-byte characters that are often seen as the problem, although UTF-8 is also supported (Unicode generally, however, is a different matter). Ruby can also support load balancing and HTTPS.. although since those aren't relevant to a programming language per se, it's intriguing why you bring them up (unless I've fallen for a troll, in which case.. well done ;-))
Other than the occasional mindblowing FPS (and even multiplayer ones are 'unlimited' in the time you can play them), I only play 'unlimited hours' games. Simulations, sports games, god games.. they're all limitless. You can play NHL hockey as many times as you want, you can keep building cities in Simcity 4 for as long as you want, you can play Battlefield 2 for as long as you want.. that's real value for money. MMORPGs, same deal.
Don't quote me on this, but I don't think JRuby actually compiles right down to Java byte code. JRuby is an interpreter that runs on the JVM itself, rather than a compiler that converts Ruby into Java byte code (or even uses JIT).
Video game commercials are still bad, in the most part. It's only this year I've noticed video game commercials start to use actual in-game footage, rather than pre-rendered crap.
Using pre-renders is also a big problem on the net. When I hear about Gran Turismo 5 (or whatever), why do they always show us great pre-rendered shots that are totally unrepresentative of what you'll see in the game? I don't want to see a preview video of the cars from the outside.. I want to see the actual gameplay footage. Yet, people drool over the pre-renders, and then when the real game hits.. it's never as good.
I guess this is a problem with all advertising, however.. but it seems particularly dishonest with videogames to me.
If Novell will pay me a mere $4 million over the next five years, I'll promise not to sue any of their customers for any reason at all.
This offer is also open to any other companies who want to take me up on it.
In this Digg generation, I've still kept reading Slashdot. The community here feels a lot nicer (surprising, I know!) and a lot more clued up. It's just a shame, then, that idiotic stories like this get posted. Usually I wouldn't whine about a bad story, but it was an hour or two before this story hit that I read the whole "why it's a scam" story on Digg.. so I read how stupid something is on Digg, only for it to be posted seriously here at Slashdot.
It's time for some sort of shakeup with editorial at Slashdot. Digg is imperfect and a lot of the users are idiots (I'd certainly say the average Slashdotter is significantly more intelligent and clued-up) but Slashdot is slow and has a poor editorial process. Could we, perhaps, strive to produce something with the perfect mix of the two? Fast news, the ability to vote, etc, but coupled with the superb Slashdot audience? It's all false hope, I'm sure, but I have more hope in people than technology.. so Slashdot is just the place to bring this up IMHO.
An cheap house costs 5x income. You get about 5 square feet to play with. We don't have mobile housing over here, the only real option is renting.
That's not true. I just saw an ad in the paper today for a mobile home in a residential park for £66k just several miles from here. Not the sort of place I'd want to live, granted, but there's always the option. They're not as common over here, but there's still a lot.
They say " pedestrians could also be asked to give prints if they are suspected to have committed an offence".
Considering that anyone can be suspected of anything, this opens the gates for totally random fingerprinting in the street. We already have random checks and detentions for the flimsiest of reasons. Consider the 34 year old woman labeled a terrorist for walking along a cycle path, the stopping and searching of an 11 year old girl near an RAF base, "the detention of a 21 year old student for taking pictures of the M3 motorway for a web-design company", the ejection of an 82 year old man at the 2005 Labour Party conference, and the detention of an 80-year-old man carrying an anti-Blair placard, for example. If you refuse, the precedents set by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Terrorism Act 2000, and Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 would ensure it unlikely you'd get off scott-free but instead become more of a suspect.
Still, I'm not going to do anything about it other than complain about it online, as is my wont. In another 50 years when I'm eating my Soylent Green in my 29th-floor bugged apartment, I can pull out ruffled print-outs of Web pages like these, and think back to a time when at least my bowel movements weren't RFID tagged and scanned for prohibited substances.
Basically, the British government is corrupt to the core and bordering on fascist. But.. what government isn't these days?
If these places are anything like my town, you can just call the cops, say there's a large group of people loitering, and get them all moved on and lose their position in line. A few times of doing that, they're not staying ;-)
My point is, whether you know Computer Science or not, if you don't have proof (read college education) that this stuff was at least presented to you properly, odds are that you'll have a tough time finding someone willing to pay you... Big companies have so much overhead when it comes to hiring people, that they'll usually just throw out any resume that doesn't say "degree"
Often true, but not always. If you know your stuff and you prove it in other ways, the offers can come flooding in. Smart companies often employ people based on their open source contributions, for example, and pay as well as, if not better, than generic companies sifting through resumes. From the small set of people I know, the smartest are always hired because they're known in their community and the quality of their work is obvious, not because they sent off a resume. Basically, smart people don't need resumes, they have their reputation.
The reviewer is right, it's a good book. It has a few inaccuracies (confusing a TIME server with an NTP server, for example) but generally it contains hundreds of code snippets that allow anyone experienced with OOP or other dynamic languages to pick up Ruby pretty easily. As he says, it's not a 'learn Ruby' book but it could be ideal for those who want to learn without being 'told' what to do.. it's just got hundreds of code examples that are written in the clean, most acceptable Ruby style, and if you can learn from code examples, it's the best book to buy right now.
Be warned, however, it doesn't go into much detail about things like libraries or Ruby on Rails, so it's not a bible to the whole Ruby ecosystem, but for the Ruby language by itself, it's great.
Portions of it border on racism, emphasizing stereotypes of a "backwater" region that might need help rather than denigration.
I'd agree, particularly when he talks to people from rural America. It makes his fictional Kazakhstan look enlightened sometimes.
Political stories (especially involving corruption) are quite popular here.
And this is political, because.. it's only a few days before the mid-terms. Wow, what a super amazing coincidence that is.
> Now the National Identity Register and National DNA Database - they scare me. I'll fight against
> those!
Why? Something to hide? Remind me of the downside again?
Let's say you repair a walkie-talkie radio for someone. That walkie-talkie then gets sold on eBay and eventually ends up in the hands of a suicide bomber. Your DNA is then found at a crime scene. Enjoy the interrogation. (Yes, this has happened.)
It depends what you're using the image tagging for. If it's just for search, a la Google, then it doesn't matter if you get some false positives (though it had better be way under 50%!). I mean, if you search for something on Google you sometimes come up with totally irrelevant stuff to the query, and people aren't that worried about it.